Ryan Tate has the best post intro so far this year in the latest edition of Gawker-playing-Valleywag:

Remember when blogs were going to be fiercely independent firebrands who, purified of old media insidery stench, would pull no punches against traditional power structures? So much for that. Today’s laptop media is shaping up to be nothing but lapdogs.

The post is really about TechCrunch releasing those Twitter documents, and the rings on the water. I don’t care about that, old news, and really a lot of noise for typical journalistic behavior.

Yes, that’s right. Michael Arrington did what thousands have done before him, but on a blog rather than in a newspaper. So who cares? read more

As any geek worth their salt knows, Robert Scoble is a huge fan of Friendfeed. Its not just the simple fact that Friendfeed aggregates all of ones sites via RSS into one place for your (even more) geekier friends, but rather that the conversations there are usually much deeper than what someone usually gets on Twitter.

Despite the fact that Twitter is a bare bones tool when compared against Friendfeed (at least feature wise), that could all easily change if Twitter decides to absorb five of its complimentary brethren which could result in Friendfeed’s irrelevance.

read more

C’mon, we all know that’s you at the computer in the image above. :)

Okay, so you’re not a machine and you probably don’t have cool laser guns sticking out of your head.

… Speaking of, um, blogging …

Here are 18 of the most critical skills to success as a blogger, plus related articles. Use this list to help you decide which skill(s) to work on now.

Blog Publishing Skills

1. Coming up with blog post ideas

• Nothing to Blog About: Hit the Ideas File by Lorelle VanFossen
• Your Immediate, Unlimited Supply of Blog Post Ideas by Chris Garrett
• Where I Get Story Ideas by Jonathan Bailey

2. Planning your blogging activities

• How Are You Planning For Your Blog’s Future? by Lorelle VanFossen read more

My my. It comes as no real surprise that Perez Hilton alias Mario Lavandeira doesn’t write all those posts himself. It has, in fact, been hinted at previously. Defamer, aka “the Hollywood column” on Gawker, got their hands on a lawsuit that confirms that it is not Mario Lavandeira who writes PerezHilton.com, but his sister Barbara. Naturally, they went digging and found out that Barbara is living a normal life, as opposed to her somewhat controversial celeb blogger brother.

Former AOL executive Jim Bankoff has raised another $7 million in funding for sports blog network SB Nation, according to Kara Swisher’s blog. The valuation after this cash flow is reported to be around some $30 million. SB Nation is the kind of blog network who recruits bloggers, and they are aiming to give fan coverage for just about any sport out there. With more than 200 blogs under the SB Nation banner, I’d say they’re giving it a serious shot at least.

The rise of Twitter and the 140 character cap it brings (which in turn comes from texting, but that’s a different story) has forced URL shortening upon us. Let’s face it, most URLs won’t leave much room for actual content in a tweet, and that’s why we use services like TinyURL and bit.ly. However, they offer risks as well, since someone can claim that an URL is for a certain thing, while it in fact is something completely different. If you’re lucky, it is just a hidden affiliate ad, but you might just as well end up at a site containing malicious code. read more

Personalities on Twitter are being hijacked to spread spam, scams and malware – look out! read more

Blog network b5media announced the launch of TNT Report, a blog focusing solely on the TNT TV network. I’m having a hard time wrapping my hear around that one, why blog about a specific TV network? Sure, they focus on drama series, but why not blog about the series themselves, and not limit to just the TNT network? Ah well, someone obviously did some market research and found this to be a good idea.

I have an easier time grasping the potential of Miley Cyrus blog Miley Report, announced a while back. This is after all one of those teen heavyweights.

There’s a new variant of W32.Koobface, a worm that was discovered in August last year, according to Symantec Security Response. It’s called called W32.Koobface.C.

It’s a good ol’ Twitter hijacker that is activated when a user inadvertently installs an “AntiVirus2008″ program.

Once hijacked, an infected Twitter account posts tweets in an attempt to infect more people. It’s usually a link to the malicious software with titles such as “my home video :)”, “watch my new private video! LOL :)” and “michaeljackson’ testament on youtube”. read more

I’m a bit surprised to see BingTweets, a marriage between Twitter and Microsoft’s search engine Bing, courtesy of Federated Media and Microsoft themselves. Why? This from the Bing blog:

How does partnering with Twitter make Bing a more effective decision engine? Many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.

Federated Media has a post up on it as well, not adding too much. I fail to be wowed by this though, it lacks the fine-tuning of projects like ExecTweets for example. This is just a ticker, some trending topics, and the option to search Bing and Twitter at the same time.